If you dread Sundays because the next day is Monday. If you find yourself thinking “getting sick for a few days would not be so bad…”. If you just stare at the screen and can no longer focus on the task at hand. If you struggle to fall asleep because you keep thinking about work, and not in a “working through a difficult problem” way. Struggling to wake up in the morning, and when you do, not feeling well-rested. Excessive drinking. Your mind taking you to dark places. Feeling like you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders and if you drop out, things go to shit.

I’m burning out at work and this is what I noticed is different

Workload: On normal work days my mental state is completely zen. I can enjoy my morning and work through issues in a leisured and still productive pace

I’m burned out now and it feels like I have to juggle dozens of tasks. Be in 8 meetings a day each of which have people demanding answers to issues I have not yet looked at. Every moment of the day I can’t wait until I can go home and just lay down

Recovery:

On normal workdays I have the mental energy to do OT if needed, I could probably do 6 hours of OT (I’ve never done this) and still feel fine the next day

Now that I’m burned out it feels like every weekend is just a small buffer until the churn resumes, I never recover from last week’s work efforts

Irritability/Patience:

On normal work days I’m the guy that picks up new critical issues because I want them fixed, or I’m involved because I don’t get anxious or scared whereas my coworkers might get scared about dealing with high priority and quick resolution issues

Nowadays I’m immediately frustrated that the company could not triage the issue accordingly and everything is “high priority” and yet when we fix things we don’t see resolution from the issuer’s end until weeks after it’s fixed

I don’t know if these answers help you but for me it’s very much about my mental headspace and how Zen/cluttered it feels